Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 January 1917 — READING LETTERS WRITTEN 4500 YEARS AGO [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

READING LETTERS WRITTEN 4500 YEARS AGO

• kX'-~\ V--' r - . ■' * * Dr. Langdon of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, is finding some remarkable documents on clay tablets dug out of Babylonian ruins . An interesting light has been shed on this ancient civilization of the Mystic East

'■V' WNDOUBtfEDLY the Sumerfan-Akka-Hl § dlnn gentleman of 2500 B. C, took f|§| i down from the shelves of his library a copy of “The Handy Letter Writer’’ and sought the model upon which he T might build the important communication he had in hand. W To his wife he made little hen * yg scratches and scrawls that great —*■ 1 ' 1 1 f * scholars tell us read; “Beloved light of mines eyes: Thy extravagances are beyond pll the patience of man. Behold, thy slave is returning without the shekels thou so brazenly hast demanded. Ever thy devoted husband.” Or, to a slave overseer who had wittingly or unwittingly done him in some household deal, he stylused in hot haste: “R is with sorrow that thy stupidity Is borne upon my consciousness. Thou hast cheated me in scales and in price. D thee, thou art not worth three - bekas a week!”— which is probably what a slave’s food cost then. This, according to May Bosnian, writing in the New York Sun. She Continues: At all events, the great wealth of tablet records dug up in Mesopotamia in recent £ears and cleaned and deciphered shows so many little familiar, intimate touches and such an abundance of letter writing on all subjects under the sun that the possibility of the existence of epistolary guides then must be borne upon our consciousness, too. An interesting lot of deciphering ufanclrtablets ~~ is being accomplished by Dr, Stephen Langdon, who came In September fNyn Oxford, England, to be curator of the Babylonian division of the University of Pennsylvania museum in Philadelphia. -He is a young man still, but he is the only man living who has seen and handled all the thousands of tablets unearthed by University of Pennsylvania museum expeditions above the city of Nippur, both those retained by the authorities at Constantinople and those sent to Philadelphia. There are only about 15 men in the world who can read Sumerian and Babylonian characters, and" he is one of them. Thanks to the war, which has left Oxford a dull, dead spot, America has secured him for one year. He will decipher as many as possible of the thousands of tablets that have been cleaned at the University of Pennsylvania museum, will publish translations of all Important ones, now or later, and will classify and catalogue the collection, a stupendous task. In 2500 B. C. papyrus and paper £or writing were unknown. Men scratched with a pointed steel instrument ealled a stylus on unbaked red clay tablets of various sizes, mostly about the size, shape and thickness of a small book. They (wrote on" both sides, and then, if they were not. (through, continued on another tablet. The analogy of these tablets to sheets of paper is not hard to comprehend. Sometimes a tale stops In the middle and the next tablet on yvhich it was continued Is never found, or Is found years later. r - In the’ temples scribes were busy copying old pieces of literature to hand down to posterity, Just as later monks spent their days and their nights copying laboriously and preserving old books for the archives of the monastery. The work ‘of the amanuenses was placed on shelves In a library—neat little rows and piles of clay books. Men digging 6,000 years later have found them, and other men have spent their lives in studying them, that they might tell us what the tablets say. The books cover a wide field and comprise odes, epics, religious- .hymns, dictionaries, scientific pamphlets. The old Babylonian and Sumerian temples were, also, great industrial, commercial, agricultural and stock-raising centers, and they kept a vast number of documents relating to these various interests. Millions of tablets have been found recording sales of cattle, slaves and staple goods; marriage contracts and agreements; divorce decrees; wills; receipts for innumerable things from jewelry and woman’s dresses to humafi chattels. There are. the timekeepers’ slips of the temple workers, and bookkeeping accounts. Doctor Langdon has found that one big banking house did business In the city of Babylon for 600 years. The great bulk of the tablets have been found on the site of the ancient temple of Nippur in Babylonia, l This temple was both a religious center and a college designed primarily'for the education of priests, but the range of textbooks unearthed there shows that instruction began at a primary stage and continued through elementary ■ and grammar grades to the regulation college course, as Babylonians conceived it, and to theological classes. The textbooks show a high order of intellectuality. Indeed, the resemblances of these people to us of today bring home again the unchangeabieness of the great antiquity of civilization, so chlled. “ Boys’ exercise books have been found repeatedly, in this gnd: in other collections. They were like presettt-uhy school slates, but made of wet clay, and the little fellow marked on them with a stylus, and when he made a mistake blotted it out with his thumb. „„ The quality and range of the textbooks astonish one. Books on mathematics abound; they taught the multiplication table up to 2,400 and, 2,500 times a number. In their financial transactions Sumerians had to do stupendous calculations 4in their heads. Doctor -Langdon has just found, too, a comprehensive volume used in the study of law; %nd among the grammar books one dealing particularly and completely with the use of the preposition. A race that has arrived at the prepo-

sition is by no means primitive! The date of this book Is 2,300 Q, C. Geography wflss-taught, as were astronomy and history. In the collection is the oldest history yet found, a tablet giving the list of Babylonian kings going back to the flood. The claim is that it is a record of 125, 000 years; but this may be disputed, since the names-of the monarchs, which seem to be those df men who reigned successively, may be of men who ruled simultaneously, in kingdoms that were adjacent. A conservative estimate is that this history' covers 14,000 years. There Is a book on botany, teaching the people how to raise the date palm, an Important crop of the times. Agricultural books abound, for the temple had a collegiate department, just as have Cornell and other American universities, where scientific farming was taught. The" Babylonians, l as Is well known, were remarkable engineers and past masters in the field of irrigation. It is not surprising that Doctor Langdon has found many records of this In the museum’s Babylonian collection. We .learn, again, of canals being dug, and of a tablet that chronicles the opening of a great waterway, like the Panama canal—-the celebration over it, the presence of the king, and the pride felt in the great skill of its engineers. Further documents are reported verifying previous assertions that the Babylonian woman received an education equal to man’s, took her place with him in certain lines, and was compensated with the same wage as he. “Books” had no cases and when found are often crumbled, broken, cracked or so badly chipped that parts of the translation must be guessed at or omitted entirely. Others, fortunately, are found intact. Letters, on the other hand, were sent in envelopes, also of clay. When the tablet letter had been duly inscribed and signed, It was rolled in a fine clay-powder and slipped into a hollow clay pocket. More fciuy dust was then shaken In, so that layers of powder were packed about the contents of the pocket and the letter could not get rubbed or scratched. The clay opening Was then sealed and stamped with the sender’s rinf. Afterward, the address was added and a slave dispatched with It. Later, we know that Babylonian and Sumerian governments supported regular postal systems. It Is quite possible that thgt regime was in existence In 2300 B. C. Many letters are found with seals unbroken, and these are marvellously preserved in their soft powdered pads. We can only surmise the reason for their sealed state. Perhaps a man kept sealed copies of the most important letters he had to. write. Duplicate copies of records and transactions have been unearthed, sometimes miles apart; and the same practice could have held, rationally, of letters. Some of these letters may never have been delivered, thanks to an inefficient postal service in some particular locality; or, and this is more plausible, the breaking out of frequent revolutions could have conceivably crippled the Babylonian post offices and left many letters forever undelivered. Indubitably the oldest undelivered letter in the world IS in the Babylonian collection of the University of Pennsylvania museum. Its date would be 22 (50 B. C., and Doctor Langdon opened and read it only last week! It is from.a master to his slave or to some underling or employee. Obviously, It is only one of several letters, since It refers to previous correspondence and to a previous transaction over which the writer is perturbed. Its archaic Sumerian is dictatorial, overbearing and peevish, gnd rants of some unsatisfactory flour deal that the underling has undertaken. One wonders whatever became of that floor! Other tablets now being catalogued have pie--tures on them. One, a hunting-Scene, reminds one of the prehistoric cave drawings found in France, There ig another of a battle scene, very much broken but rare and interesting. -Thetjoming of Doctor Langdon to the University of Pennsylvania museum is timely and fortunate. The Babylonian division has had no cu-

rator since the beginning of the European war, wheir"Dr.“Arao Poebel left to join his- regiment at the Herman front. The Eckley. B. Coxe, Jr., expeditions, which began operations in Egypt in 1889 and have carried them on through various years since, even finding localities of the warridden land where they can still operate this year, have sent back to the museum an incalculable trqasure-trove, not only in tablets, but in all kinds of articles dug up from the dirt layers of Biblical and pre-Biblical lands. All this accumulation has not had the attention It deserved. Doctor Langdon’s labors will be bent toward arranging the Babylonian exhibit. The collection is the largest in the world. No other museum has such a quantity of sacred Sumerian documents, which make this the most Important Babylonian collection in the world, even though It is not so large as that In the British museum. The war, which already has done so much damage, bids fair to rob us of this comparative recent achievement, the ability to decipher these tablets which tell of the lives and histories of peoples who lived - so many hundred years ago. Younger men, like Poebel, are at the front and may never come back; other well-known Egyptologists are Old men. Not enough young men will be left to carry on the work of translating the ancient cuneiform When the present scholars pass away the achievement may die with them and SubierianAkkadjan become agaifl a dead language, for not enough young college men are proposing -to take up archeology. There is today no endowed seat of Assyriology in any university. The University of Pennsylvania museum is exerting every effort to secure such an endowment, that other intellects of so high an order as Doctor Langdon’s may be encouraged and helped to carry on a work similar to his. Eckley B. Coxe, Jr., died in Philadelphia in September last and left an endowment fund of $500,000 to carry on the work he has been equipping expeditions to do In Egypt so many years. But one expedition can only scratch the surface of the myriad hills there and the countless buried and forgotten cities that -He beneath them. - “Our only hope of getting the rest of the tablets burled there,” says Doctor Langdon, ‘fis to go back to Nippur again and again, and dig for them.” Endowments for these-expeditions are another of the crying needs of scholars. The world at large will lose if archeological excavations and research have to be abandoned. There is no doubt that the general public appreciates the work done by museums and by scholars. To Biblical students alone there is inexhaustlhle pleasure and satisfaction to be derived from facts unearthed of Biblical and pre-Bibllcal, peoples. Thore is now complete agreement among archeologists that Hammurabi is that same Aiuraphet of Genesis 14:1, a contemporary of Abraham. From chronological inferences It follows that Abraham may well have attended school at the temple in Nippur; nay, that he studied these viry books that are 1 now In the University of Pennsylvania museum. He may have read there the account of the creation. Why not? The dates dovetail- cv _ _ “Let me take ont and touch ope of those tablets,” said a religious man recently In the University of Pennsylvania museum. “I believe In my peart that the hand of Abraham must have held any or all of them nearly 5,000 years ago!”